Youth

It’s almost time to stop work for the day in the village of Fass in southern Mauritania near that country’s border with Senegal.

38-year-old farmer Omar has been picking eggplant and hot-peppers since dawn in the hot sun. He says he makes enough to support his wife and six children, but that he’d hoped to do something different with his high school degree:

“What spoiled it for me is 1989,” he says, referring to the Mauritanian-Senegalese border conflict which sent tens of thousands of black Mauritanians like Omar fleeing into neighboring Senegal.

Photo: James Martone. Elders in the village of Fass in southern Mauritania say they will never forget the violent events of their country’s 1989-1991 conflict with neighboring Senegal.

Omar says that when he finally came back to Rosso in 1993, the area was destroyed and neither he nor his brothers could find jobs.

“We tried many different things, but we ended up in agriculture.”

In April 1989, a dispute between Senegal and Mauritania over grazing rights erupted into violence. In both nations, people thought to be linked to the other side were forced into exile. Violence in ethnically mixed Mauritania led about 70,000 black Mauritanians to flee to Senegal. When the conflict ended in 1991, many of those, like Omar, slowly trickled back.

Soulaymanou never left.

The black Mauritanian from the southern city of Rosso says he stayed in his hometown during the conflict 20 years ago, despite Arab lynch mobs and police attacks on blacks. He stopped going to high school, bought a gun and holed himself up with his family in their small house for three months.

We often forget that before we thought of Haiti as a place recovering from a devastating earthquake, it was a country struggling with conflict, limited services, and extreme poverty.

Haiti was on a slow road to recovery when the quake hit and more then 250,000 people died. For many Haitians their nation's double tragedy is far from over. Although there are signs of hope and improvement.

In our WDR Concept Note, we have written about an ‘expectations trap’. We argue that persistent violence and disappointment at efforts to tackle it can fracture peoples’ confidence in their leaders and institutions: a crisis of confidence that can snowball, as when investors lose faith in the stock market. Under this dynamic of despair, people are more prone to embrace violence, out of anger or an effort to preserve dignity and identity.

Gaza is a literal expectations trap, both physical and psychological. It is true that Israeli settlers and soldiers no longer live here, but it must be hard for any but the more avid Hamas supporters to find many positives out of two decades of ‘peacemaking’—let alone believe that a just resolution is anywhere near happening. Visiting almost a year after the recent war with Israel, Laurence Wright described the isolation and hopelessness in the The New Yorker: “I began to see Gaza as, I suspect, many Gazans do: a floating island, a dystopian Atlantis, drifting farther away from contact with any other society.”